Saving and loading

Your towers live in your own browser, on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to sign into.

The autosave and the slots

The game saves the tower you’re playing every 30 seconds, on its own, into the Auto-save. When you come back, Continue on the opening screen picks up where you left off.

Saved Towers in the game menu also has three numbered slots. Save puts the tower you’re playing into a slot, and Load brings one back. The slots are handy for keeping a copy before you try something risky, or for running more than one tower.

Each slot shows its tower’s name, whether it’s Classic or Modern, its rating, population and funds, and when it was saved.

Saving over another tower

The slot that holds the tower you’re playing is marked This tower, and its Save button saves right away. A slot holding any other tower says Replace… instead. Click it and the game asks first, showing the tower already in the slot and the one you’re playing. Cancel is the default button, so pressing Enter or Esc keeps the saved tower. To keep both, save to an empty slot or use Export to file.

When the game starts, after you load the Auto-save, or after you rename your tower, it can’t be sure which slot is yours, so it asks the first time. After you save to a slot or load one, that slot is marked This tower.

Replaced or deleted a tower by mistake? An Undo line appears under the slots and puts it back. Only the last replace or delete can be undone. Undo goes away if you save something else into that slot or reload the page, and Undo for a replace also goes away when you load or start another tower.

Exporting to a file

Export to file packs your tower into a .vctower file and downloads it. That file is the way to:

keep a backup somewhere safe,
move a tower to another device or browser, or
share it with a friend.

Import from file (or Load from a file on the opening screen) brings a .vctower back in.

Because saves live in your browser, clearing your browsing data for the site deletes them. Export anything you’d hate to lose. Importing and exporting has the details.

Towers from the 1994 game

Have an old SimTower save? Load its .TDT file the same way, with Load from a file. The game reads the tower and lists what it brought over, and anything it couldn’t. A 1994 tower comes in as a Classic tower.

You can also go the other way. Export a Classic tower and choose For SimTower (1994) to download a .TDT file the original game can open. This is still experimental: it’s known to work for smaller towers. A Modern tower can’t be saved for 1994, since the original has no room for the things Modern adds. See Importing and exporting for what carries over each way.

If something goes wrong

“Your tower isn’t being saved.” This notice stays in the top corner when the game can’t write its saves. Most often the browser won’t keep site data: a private or incognito window, site storage turned off for the site, or a disk that’s full. Click Export tower… to save the tower to a .vctower file right away, then play in a normal window with site storage allowed and load the file back in. The notice goes away by itself once saving works again (the game tells you so), and Dismiss hides it until the next time saving fails. A slot’s Save button and the 💾 Quick Save button also say at once when a save didn’t work.
A save this version can’t read. If a newer version of the game wrote it, update the game (see Installing and updates) and try again. The game keeps the unreadable save aside, and Download unreadable save gives you a copy to attach to a bug report.
If the game stops. If the game engine crashes, the game reloads your tower from its last autosave. If it crashes again, it stops and says so. Your saves are still on your device, and Reload tries again.
Something’s wrong in a tower. Please report it, and attach the exported tower if you can.